Spanish Lesson

"We cannot be a bilingual nation like Canada," Romney told the Union Leader in New Hampshire, where few Latinos live, so few were likely to get that message.

Yet down in Florida, Romney was one of the first in the race to air a Spanish-language radio ad, and he is one of the few GOP candidates to have an "En Español" Web option. Click on it, and see one of Romney's sons give a video testimonial in excellent Spanish, acquired during a missionary stint in Chile: "Hola, soy Craig Romney, y les quiero hablar un poco sobre mi papá, Mitt Romney . . . "

Al Cardenas, a Romney adviser and former Florida GOP chairman whose voice was heard in the Spanish-language ad, says these are not contradictory positions.

"What he feels strongly about is the English language can unite us all," Cardenas says. But Romney also understands the need to meet voters where they are, in the language of politics:

Says Cardenas: "You have grandparents who only speak one language, Spanish; parents who might speak English not well but certainly understand it; and then you've got grandchildren who are the first generation collegegoers who prefer to speak in English. All of these people congregate in the same household. If you're running a political campaign, you say to yourself, 'What do we do?' "

Language of Getting Ahead

President Bush -- following the premise of Ronald Reagan, whose quip, "Hispanics are Republicans, they just don't know it yet," is translated into Spanish on the Republican National Committee's "En Español" Web page -- has known what to do.

At the height of immigrant-rights marches a year ago, when a recording of the National Anthem in Spanish caused an uproar, Bush said the anthem should be sung in English, and added: "I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English."

That was the politics of language. Yet the language of Bush's politics is frequently, famously, in Spanish. He spent $3.3 million on Spanish-language TV ads for his reelection, according to the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University. In a campaign video, he said, in English, "We all know that the Latino vote could be the deciding factor in this presidential election." In Spanish: "Usted me conoce. Ya sabe quien soy," which means, "You know me. You know who I am."

Bush also was the first president to deliver a weekly radio address in Spanish, and he has all his Saturday radio addresses dubbed in Spanish.

Democrats come at this delicate dance from the other side of the room. Hailing "diversity" and "multiculturalism" is a standard party line, and most Latinos vote Democratic, so Democratic politicians can afford to eschew the most ostentatious displays of English chauvinism. But only to a point.

Sen. Ken Salazar, the Latino Democrat from Colorado, offered an amendment to last year's immigration bill that would have declared English the "common and unifying language." It was an alternative to an amendment by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) to make English the "national language." Inhofe's passed 63 to 34, Salazar's 58 to 39, though neither became law.

It is the Inhofe measure that is expected to come up again this week. The senator says it would simply make clear that people aren't entitled to certain government services in other languages. Inhofe, by the way, is proficient in Spanish and on other occasions gives speeches in Spanish.